Beast (19 page)

She lay down in her bunk and turned on the little reading light over her head and picked up her copy of Anne Rice’s The Mummy—her mother’s choice for her, and perfect for a trip like this: romantic, scary, long enough to last several days and easy to pick up and put down without losing the plot. She found her place.

Ramses had brought Cleopatra back to life, and Cleopatra was making out with every man she met and then killing him, and …

She had to go to the John. She sighed and got up and walked aft, past the chart table, and opened the door to the head. The smell assaulted her, worse than the public Johns in Penn Station. She didn’t have to look, but she did, and sure enough, it was clogged. She stepped on the flush pedal and gave the pump handle one try, but the sound-—a strangled gurgle—warned her against trying again.

She went forward to the other head. There was a piece of masking tape on the door, with OUT OF ORDER on it in marking pen.

Swell.

She went back to her bunk and opened the drawer beneath it and fetched her emergency John: an empty quart mayonnaise jar.

Then she returned to the after head and held her breath as she peed in the jar, thinking only: Please let tomorrow come, let me go to sleep and not wake up till we’re at the dock.

When she had finished, she screwed the top tight and started up through the hatch.

“Life jacket,” her father said.

“I’m just …” She showed him the jar.

“Both now?”

“Uh-huh. Again.”

“Lord … well, we’ll fix ‘em when we get in.”

Uncle Lou said, with a little snicker, “Ladies …”

“Uncle Lou …” Catherine said. “I wasn’t great at biology, but I think men go to the John, too … sometimes.”

“I stand corrected,” Uncle Lou said, smiling.

“Here,” said her father, and he held his hand out to take the jar.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“Muffin …”

“I’ll do it.”

“Then put your life jacket on.”

“Daddy … Oh, all right.” She backed down the ladder and went to her bunk and got her life jacket. She was angry, embarrassed, annoyed. Nobody else was wearing a life jacket, and they were running around the deck like monkeys. She wanted to take three steps to empty a jar overboard, and he was making her dress up like an astronaut.

She put the life jacket on and thought, Who’s being dumb now? Why don’t you let him throw it over for you? Because. Because what? Because it’s … private. Stupid. He used to change your diapers. Never mind, too late now.

She went up through the hatch and stepped around the wheel and started forward on the leeward side of the boat. The sun was low in the western sky, low enough so that the ocean swells blocked it, and here, further shaded by the big sail, the light was as dim as evening.

“Snap in,” her father said.

“Yes, sir.” She snapped the lifeline onto the quarter-inch cable connecting two stanchions.

“I know you find this hard to believe, but I’m not being a pain just to amuse myself.”

“No, sir.” She knew she sounded petulant, but she couldn’t help it.

She unscrewed the cap of the jar and, her knees braced against a stanchion, leaned out to empty the jar. The jar was big for her hand, and as she upended it, it slipped. Reflexively, she reached for it with her other hand, and she dropped the cap, and she lunged to grab that, too, and then suddenly there was a little stutter in the wind, a puff that pushed the boat farther over. And then suddenly there was nothing supporting her legs, and because most of her weight was overboard she lost her balance and fell, somersaulting.

In that split second, she knew that the lifeline would stop her and swing her back into the boat, and she tensed and raised her hands to her head. There was a jolt as the lifeline caught. She heard herself screaming, and something else, a weird tearing noise, and then, when she should have felt herself slamming against the side of the boat, she felt … water.

, She was underwater, upside down, and then the life jacket righted her and she bobbed to the surface. She couldn’t see—her hair was in her eyes. She wiped it away, and still she couldn’t see anything but water, great undulating swells of blue-black water.

This couldn’t be! What had happened? She looked down at her life jacket, and there was a jagged hole where the lifeline had torn away.

She could hear her father shouting, and other people too, a jumble of words, so she used her hands to turn herself around, and there, silhouetted against the setting sun, was the top of the mast, heading away from her, the sail flapping, the voices growing fainter.

A swell rose beneath her and carried her high on its crest, and now she could see all of the mast and even the top of the cabin. She screamed, but she felt—no, she knew—that the wind was snatching her words away and flinging them eastward into the night.

The swell passed her, and she slid into the trough, and now she saw none of the boat, not even the top of the mast.

She felt something in the water that encased her, a pulsing, very faint, but definite.

The engine. They’d turned on the engine. Good. Now they could maneuver, and find her fast. Fast. Before night fell.

Another swell came, and from its crest she saw the mast again, looking farther away, and all the lights were on it—masthead light, running lights, anchor lights—so she would be able to see it.

She screamed again and waved her arms, but they couldn’t hear her now. Of course they couldn’t, not with the engine on.

Why did they keep moving away from her? Why didn’t they turn around?

Then the boat did turn, its bow slewing to the right; it began to circle back to her. Good. They’d find her now.

The swell dropped her into a trough, where she could see nothing but water.

If she couldn’t see them, how could they see her? They stuck up fifty feet. How far did she stick up? Two feet?

Save your strength, she thought. Don’t scream, don’t flail around till you’re on the top of a wave, where they can see you.

A swell raised her up, and she saw the boat, almost all of it … but it was moving away from her, in a different direction! She screamed.

As that swell dropped her down again, she turned her head to the west. The sun was gone, leaving only an orange glow on the horizon, and pink-rimmed clouds against the darkening sky. Overhead she could see stars.

It would be dark soon. They had to find her … had to … or …

Don’t even think about it.

God, it was cold! How could she be so cold so soon? She’d only been in the water a few minutes, but her arms and legs were trembling, and her throat and jaw were quivering so badly that she had trouble breathing.

It floated in the cool middle layer of the ocean water, unthreatened, unperturbed, drifting.

It had fed recently, gorging itself, so for now it felt no urgency to hunt.

It was existing, merely existing.

And then, from somewhere far away, it felt the thrum of a pulse, faint waves that coursed through the water and tapped at its flesh.

Curious rather than concerned, it fluttered its tail fins and slowly rose.

Had it encountered warmer water, it would have stopped, for comfort was its only imperative. But the cool layer continued, and so it allowed itself to rise.

It sensed light now, and the pulse was nearer, and there was something else, something apart from the pulse, disturbing the water above.

Something alive.

A swell lifted Katherine, and when she reached the crest she saw the boat, the whole boat—nearby!—a dark shape against the twilight sky, with the white and red and green lights shining from the mast.

She screamed and waved her arms, then slid off the crest and back into the trough again.

They hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard her. Why? They were so close! She had heard them, had heard the engine and even maybe a voice.

She was downwind, that was why. Sound was carrying from them to her but not from her to them.

Dark. It was dark, almost night. And cold. And deep. How deep? Forever deep.

Now, at last, terror struck her, a true gut primal fear that flooded through her veins and tore at every nerve ending.

Her father had talked of monsters, and now she knew they were going to get her. Nightmare images flashed into her mind, images she hadn’t had in years, since she was six or eight, all the beasts that had lived under her bed and in the closet and in the rustling trees outside her window. Always her mother had come into her room and comforted her, told her everything was fine, the monsters were make-believe.

But nobody rushed to comfort her now. Make-believe was real.

She felt so alone, a loneliness she had never known existed, as if she were the only living thing on the planet.

Thoughts tumbled over one another in her head: Why had she insisted on coming on this trip? Why hadn’t she let her father empty the jar for her? Why, why, why?

She tried to pray, but all she could think of was, Now I lay me down to sleep… .

She was going to die.

No!

She screamed again—not on purpose, not to be noticed, but the scream of a living being protesting death.

She was carried to the top of another crest, and saw that the boat was there, even closer, but something was different. It wasn’t moving; it had stopped. She could hear no engine noise.

As she slid into the trough, she heard a voice: her father, talking through a loud-hailer.

“Katherine, can you hear me? We can’t see you, but we’ve turned off the engine, turned off everything, so we’ll be able to hear you. If you can hear me, as soon as I stop, you scream, honey, scream for all you’re worth, okay? … Now scream!”

She thought: He called me Katherine.

She screamed.

It was one hundred feet below the surface. It hovered, letting its senses gather information.

The pulse from above had stopped, but there was disturbance on the surface, and something small, moving.

The living thing. Slowly, it rose.

“I hear you, Katherine! Again! Again!”

She screamed again, her voice scratchy, not as loud, but she summoned all her strength and forced herself to scream again, and again.

A swell caught her, and from its crest she saw a searchlight swinging toward her. She prayed she wouldn’t drop away until it had found her, but she was dropping, dropping. She waved her arms. It was going to miss her!

At the last instant, the light caught her upraised hands—she saw the beam illuminate her grasping fingers—and stopped swinging, and she heard the voice on the loud-hailer cry, “Got you!”

Then she heard the engine start again.

The pulse had begun again … closer, more distinct, moving toward the small living thing.

Excited now, it rose, and its color changed. It was excited not by hunger, not by a sense of an impending battle or an imminent threat, but by a desire to kill.

It began to feel the swells, for it was near the surface.

When Katherine reached the top of a swell, the light hit her face and blinded her. But the boat was there, she could feel the beat of the engine, she could smell the exhaust.

Something splashed beside her, something big, and she felt an arm around her waist and heard a voice say, “I’ve got you … it’s okay … it’s okay.”

Timmy. She wrapped her arms around him, and then she felt herself being pulled, and her hand touched the hard side of the boat.

*

It was there, the living thing, directly above, thrashing.

A wounded animal.

Prey.

More than prey.

Food.

The creature drew a mass of water into the caverns of its body and expelled it through the funnel in its belly, and it shot upward.

Hands grabbed Katherine and pulled so hard she thought her arms might come out of their sockets, but then she was in her father’s embrace, and he was crushing her against him and saying, “Oh, sweetheart … oh baby … oh Muffin …”

Other hands pulled Timmy aboard, and he fell onto the deck, coughing.

Then someone said, “What’s that smell?”

She heard the clunk of the engine’s gears engaging, and she felt the boat begin to move.

Then, as her father carried her to the after hatch, voices:

“Hey, look!”

“What?”

“Back there.”

“Where?”

“Something in the water.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“There! Right there!”

“What? What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“Probably just our wake.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s nothing. We’ve got her back. Forget it.”

*

The pulse was fading again, the living thing was gone.

The creature wallowed in the swells and scanned the water with one of its mammoth yellow-white eyes. It raised its whips and swept them across the surface, searching. But it found nothing, and so it sank back into the deep.

Wrapped in blankets, Katherine lay in her bunk, and let her father feed her soup. He was laughing and crying at the same time, and his hand shook so that finally she took the soup from him and fed herself.

Evan had taken her clothes off for her—not so stuck-up anymore, in fact rather nice—and washed her off with hot water and given her one of her own sweat suits.

Timmy stopped by on his way to the shower and didn’t say anything, just bent down and kissed her forehead.

David and Peter and Uncle Lou, everybody, came in one at a time and said something, and there wasn’t a condescending remark among them.

She felt like a celebrity, and she liked it. For once, she had a story she could tell, when everybody else was boasting. For once, the excitement had included her.

Her eyes drooped. She thought she’d like to sleep all the way to Bermuda.

AS WHIP DARLING took a breath, he realized that the air was coming slowly, reluctantly, as if he were sucking on an empty soda bottle. His tank was almost out. He might get one more breath, two at most, before he’d have to surface.

Never mind, he was only five feet down. If he drew a vacuum, he’d spit out the mouthpiece and exhale and go up.